Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS.
You can use either the maintenance release Perl 5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2 in AmigaOS.
See "PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS" if you want to help fixing this problem.

You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important part is ixemul.library. For a minimum setup, get the latest versions of the following packages from the Aminet archives ( http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/ ):

ixemul-bin
ixemul-env-bin
pdksh-bin

Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add other packages of ADE (the Amiga Developers Environment).

Start your Perl program foo with arguments arg1 arg2 arg3 the same way as on any other platform, by

perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3

If you want to specify perl options -my_opts to the perl itself (as opposed to your program), use

perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3

Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's Execute command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the s-Bit of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with

foo arg1 arg2 arg3

(Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not necessary, perl would be enough, but having full path would make it easier to use your script under *nix.)

As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2. After Perl 5.7.2 (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the individual changes) Perl dropped its internal support for vfork(), and that was very probably the step that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork). The build finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and PERL ends up as "0" in the produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does not quite work. Also, executing miniperl in backticks seems to generate nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems. Fixing the breakage requires someone quite familiar with the ixemul library, and how one is supposed to run external commands in AmigaOS without fork().